<html>
<head>
<title>Slug: Releases</title>
</head>

<body>

	<p align="center">
		<a href="http://www.ldodds.com/projects/slug">
			<img src="slug-small.jpg" border="0"/></a>
	</p>

	<p>
		<h2 align="center">Slug: Roadmap</h2>
	</p>

	<p>	
	This page contains some notes on the expected functionality that will be 
	included in future iterations of Slug. Bear in mind that development is a 
	part-time activity, with a priority set by what problems/features I either 
	find interesting or necessary for my own projects. 
	</p>
	
	<p>
	Nagging is a good way to get features implemented. If I know someone is using 
	the code, that's good motivation.</p>
	
	<p>
	Of course an even better way to move things forward is to code it 
	yourself and then share! If there's enough interest, perhaps the project can 
	be moved to Sourceforge.
	</p>
	
	<h4><code>alpha-3</code> "The Behaviour Release"</h4>
		
	<p>
	Slug isn't very well behaved. It needs to:
	</p>

	<ul>
		<li>Support the Robot Exclusion Protocol</li>
		<li>Allow configuration of the <code>User-Agent</code> header</code>
		<li>Implement throttling on a global and per-domain basis</li>
		<li>Check additional HTTP status codes to "skip" more errors</li>
		<li>Support white-listing of URLs</li>
		<li>Expose and capture more statistics while in-progress</li>
	</ul>

	<p>
	The following additional features will be useful:
	</p>
	
	<ul>
		<li>Support Content Negotiation to allow for additional RDF syntaxes</li>	
		<li>Follow more than just <code>rdfs:seeAlso</code> links to find data, by 
		allowing pluggable link discovery</li>
		<li>Integrate a smushing utility for managing persistent data</li>
		<li>Alter the Consumer components to be structured as a pipeline, enabling 
		pre-processing of incoming content, e.g. to use GRDDL to extract data.</li>
	</ul>
		
	<h4><code>alpha-4</code> "For Control Freaks"</h4>
	
	<p>
	Slug needs to be easier to control. The Monitor component should be made 
	pluggable to allow for a GUI or Web Application to be used to control the Scutter.
	</p>
			
	<h4><code>beta-1</code> "Testing, Testing"</h4>
	
	<p>
	Concentrate on additional unit and functional testing. Aim to have stabilised 
	APIs, particular around the component model to aim for a stable 1.0 release.
	</p>
				
	<hr/>
	<font size="smaller">
	Image courtesy of <a href="http://flickr.com/people/enygmatic/">Elroy Serrao</a>.
	</font>
</body>

</html>